Consumer Innovation Trumps Business Innovation

What’s really funny here is the fact that these companies are wanting to adopt iPads (the article says “tablets”, but come on, it’s iPads) and are leading the change rather than their IT departments. 

Small and mid-sized businesses planning tablet buying spree

This… this… is what I love about this new “consumer-based” technology revolution. Never before in the history of computers has there been this kinda’ movement, and it’s exactly the kind of movement that I like seeing. 

No longer do you have business and IT assholes dictating what the rest of the world uses… devices they dictate we, the everyday person, will use long after they’ve been using them and have moved onto the next generation technology. It used to be CEO’s and CTO’s (chief technology officers) of major, pretentious Fortune 500 companies drove where innovation and technology was headed. They, and the IT industry, created a class-warfare type of divide between big business users and everyone else. Big business used to idolize companies such as IBM and later RIM (Blackberry). These tech companies catered to their enterprise segments and really treated their consumers as second-class citizens. 

The poster child for this type of scenario is embodied best by RIM and their Blackberry. This was a company that rose to power fast by giving Fortune 500 managers and IT departments exactly what they wanted: elitism and prestige for the managers and control and complexity for the IT techs. Blackberrys were extremely expensive and their service very costly… unless you bought in bulk and dedicated your entire infrastructure to their technology. This ensured that only the biggest of big companies could afford Blackberrys. In time, RIM created lower-end Blackberrys for your average working person and later consumers, but they were cheap, crappy, overpriced devices. See, CEO’s and CTO’s wouldn’t have been happy if their workers got devices with the same capabilities as them.

This power trip among those in control created a working environment that was hostel towards intuitiveness, simplicity and innovation. Just four to five years ago, nearly all Fortune 500 companies had a strict policy that no emails could be accessed on any mobile device unless it was a Blackberry. Workers were stuck with some of the WORST laptops, IBM’s and their God-awful little eraser head pointer devices, because their CEO’s and CTO’s insisted they were the best laptops.

Workers, consumers and small businesses developed a resistance to change because it was never positive change for them but was always a positive change for someone else (namely the IT department). This became the normal for, what… 20 years? Consumers were left with inferior products while big business dictated the path of innovation (or lack-there-of). 

But then something changed… it all started with the iPhone, a device not only far, far superior to anything big business was using, but a device targeted towards the everyday person and not the business-ruling elite! CEO’s and CTO’s thought of it, and Android phones, as nothing but a toy. But people started buying their own iPhones and started using them for work instead of their company-issued Blackberrys. That’s when things started to change. Soon the CEO’s were using iPhones and Androids and only the CTO’s were the ones left crying bloody murder… well them, and RIM.

Then the iPad was introduced and that changed up the mindset for millions, if not billions, of people. Now, anyone with $500, from a housewife to a college student to a CEO could possess a device that, just a few years ago, should have only been reserved for the business elite. 

This is now where your seeing real innovation happen in business. No longer is business innovation limited to companies grossing millions of dollars but to whoever has the best ideas and who’s willing to take risks. That’s why, even though hospitals ARE adopting iPads at a brisk pace, you got the article above that talks about small clinics taking charge in innovation. 

Damn I love the period of history we live in, in a technological perspective. I typed this entire blog post while chillin’ in bed, on the same device (my iPad) that this article talked about leading innovation. I hope we never move from consumer-led innovation ever again. JbB